“The Colors of Maps” by David Mohan

I
went out with a painter once. He was always on the look-out for a
new color he’d never seen before. It could be a store sign or
some spice or fabric at the market—he’d rush back to his apartment and
try to mix the color on the spot.

He used to wear these thin-soled loafers. He would say they were so
comfortable it was like strolling down the sidewalk in your slippers. He
thought the whole city was his home.

When we first met, he said to me, “It might be the color of your eyes, but you look like someone I know.”

I thought, “This guy’s full of cheap lines”, but he was serious. Over
time he looked closely at my eyes and told me they were grey-blue,
cobalt, aqua.

I said, “Can’t you decide?”

And he would reply, “They change depending on the light.”

The last time we met, I discovered him painting this nude guy in his
studio. He jumped slightly when I came in, and then settled down to
paint again, but I felt there was a tension between them. I browsed
around the studio while my painter finished his painting. Everywhere I
looked there was painting after painting of this guy in every colour you
can imagine.

It was then that I knew my painter and I were finished.

Once, our apartment had been full of paintings of my face. That’s the
sort of thing love produces. When I looked up at this new kid, I saw
that his eyes were possibly sea-green, or basalt, or mint. One of those.
I couldn’t figure out which. I could also see that my painter would be
lost in those eyes for some time to come.

We split up. I don’t do scenes, so it was fairly dignified. He
cleared out of my life and the last thing I heard he was living in his
studio. I suppose it was convenient. He could just live for his work
without having to care about ordinary life. Which was exactly what he
liked.

He took a few of the things we had shared, but he had always cared
more about people than about things, and so he left most of his stuff
with me.

I sold all his paintings except one—the first one he painted of me.
When I looked at it, I could tell he had been paying full attention.

He left behind most of his paints and brushes and for some reason I
held onto them. The actual sketches held too many memories, and so I
burnt them in our fireplace, but the paint boxes and empty canvases
comforted me. Every time I looked at them I thought of a new beginning.

Don’t get me wrong—I was never interested in becoming a painter. I
just liked to look at the raw materials of the craft sometimes. I would
sit on my bed and pour a paint box out onto the bed covers. The tubes of
paint were invariably bearded with old paint—like barnacles. Sometimes
the paint had dried inside and wouldn’t shift when you tried to squeeze
it out. It had become a sort of plastic. I threw those ones away. That
paint wasn’t going anywhere soon.

My painter used to instruct me in the art of painting. He’d tell me that Aquamarine, Prussian Blue, Burnt Umber
and all the rest of them were not real colors. Instead, he’d say it was
better to think of them as First Principles. The real colours you use
to paint skin or anger or melancholy are always found by mixing on the
palette.

I liked this idea. I would carry a tube of paint with me sometimes
when I travelled on the subway. I felt as though I was travelling with
an ultimate truth in my pocket. I would bring Lamp Black with me
on a journey to an uptown restaurant and feel protected. I would
hear my painter explaining that there was something fundamental about
these colors, and that this was why we returned to them, mixing up new
versions of what was.

I moved out of the city eventually, and grew older, like you do. I
found other men along the way with various-colored eyes. It was never
the same experience. I ended up in one of those buttoned-up resort towns
on the East coast with a guy from the Midwest. It was a respectable
sort of place, artsy in a traditional sort of way. I kept well away from
painting, though I still thought about colors from time to time.

I would get sad and think about my time in the city. I would take out
old maps and look at the colors of the subway routes and the grid of
streets. I could spend whole afternoons lost in study. I would crackle
and smooth old paper, attempting to match a street name to the color it
was marked with on the map. I suppose it was nostalgia or something, but
it was like the old way I used to look at a painting. I would trace a
line in my mind to where it paused, or follow a curve to where it
melted.

I would fold my maps away then and feel slightly sad and happy at the
same time. That was the past, I thought, and put it away in a drawer. I
would go outside then and walk beside the ocean.

It was only sometimes it would all return to me in a way I couldn’t
control. I would dream of the subway and the apartment I had left
behind, and then the city’s vast map would burst open in my head. I
would wake feeling overwhelmed, my eyes as wide as some Hicksville
innocent just off the train. I would grope in the dark for the light
switch, my thoughts dazzled by the lights and signs of Grand Central
Station.